February 4, 2013 AT 10:00 am

Adafruit Visit to the Industry City Distillery #makerbusinessmonday #makerbusiness

A couple of weeks ago, a handful of MakerBot staff members had the pleasure of visiting the Industry City Distillery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to learn not only how they produce and distribute their “small batch” vodka, but also how they are using the experience of designing a custom distillation process from the ground up to re-imagine what it means to create a scalable distillation pipeline. (Click the photo above or here to see the complete slideshow of the trip.)

Taking a walking tour through the whole operation lead by the ICD core team was a real pleasure, with a special highlight of learning how they have perfected a continuous fermentation process to create a high grade alcohol at the beginning of the distillation process using a technique used to produce insulin for the medical industry. Larger breweries and distilleries had dismissed the continuous fermentation process as too difficult and expensive, but ICD will be using their research to help them build out additional production lines as they continue to scale up their business to meet the demand.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering" - Freeman Dyson